The Thunder Bolt

UNESCO has recognized eight different Vietnamese musical forms as intangible art forms, yet traditional Cheo opera is not among them. 

Two Concordia 2023 graduates Karin and Yu Hyeon have co-authored a paper along with music teacher Mr. Crowden and humanities teacher Mr. Creek, now under review for publication, exploring the roots of the Cheo art form, its status today and making the case for future UNESCO inclusion.

What did you learn from this project?

"I want to study Asian history in college and I think being exposed to an art form that was passed down vocally instead of in script and is part of a peasant culture in the past. It’s interesting and inspiring to see how such an old musical form is still present today and is still being reformed and reimagined," said Karin.

"This project ignited my interest in Cheo from the cultural and historical perspective because the more we learned about it, the more reasons we discovered to support adding it to the UNESCO Heritage list. I think that studying it more, and interviewing Cheo musicians solidified my historical understanding of Cheo," Karin added. 

"I am an instrument player myself, and I’m interested in how they work and the scales they use. I was able to learn about those instruments and how they evolved during our field work and upon careful examination of the videos of the performances.

"They use a pentatonic scale. One of the players told us that they improvise a lot, but the wind instruments have limited notes they can play. So the players manipulate and make micro-adjustments to intonation within the key, while playing with the predetermined set of notes. They have a pattern they play and improvise within the pattern," said Yu Hyeon. 

What did you learn from the musicians themselves about why they are passionate about Cheo and why do they keep it going?

"One musician said he was from a Cheo family and so was exposed to Cheo and learned it from when he was very young and grew up as a Cheo music player. Another said she was in the National Academy of Music and learned Cheo there," said Yu Hyeon. 

"One of the operas we investigated appears to date from the late 15th or early 16th century, when there was cultural diffusion between values as Confucianism became more prominent in Vietnam, existing alongside other traditional belief systems," Karin explained.  

"Cheo conveys a lot of traditional virtues values, from openness to Confucianism and Buddhism, religion, and learning about it can have an influence on the listeners' value systems. We heard about themes like being at peace with the universe and being true to yourself," Karin added. 

What is the status of Cheo opera today?

"We originally thought they were dying, but one musician told us they’re trying to modify the traditional theater and make a new theater with the traditional script. So they are trying to bring the attention of younger people to Cheo music again," said Yu Hyeon.

"There was more of a centralized theater in Hanoi. Now the funding is being cut so they’re having a hard time maintaining the theater, and many of the guild performers are moving to more local and provincial theaters. So while it’s not dying, it’s not flourishing as a profession, and the focus has shifted back to the local amateur scene," Yu Hyeon added.  

"I also learned that Okinawa and Tay Nguyen have a similar scale, and the theory is that people adapted the scales to fit the altitude of these regions. And Japanese traditional music has a similar bending of melody," said Karin. 

"Some of the instruments are similar to Korean music," said Yu Hyeon. 

Background on Cheo

Today there are approximately 12 Cheo traditional operas which are part of the canon, but there are hundreds of new Cheo operas which are being written all the time. These works are often presented in state opera houses, many of which are being shut down, and so the focus is shifting to the local amateur level. 

Cheo content is social commentary. Poets would travel from city to city, informed by the royal court of the virtues that the royal family wanted disseminated, and would write a play based on that, with the words set to their favorite songs. So the Cheo opera was very adaptive as an art form. 

Noted ethnomusicologist Barley Norton explains that, historically, Cheo musicians were virtuosic. They did not learn a fixed melody. They learnt orally and internalized the basic melodic framework and then used different variations and embellishments in each performance. Teachers would sit with them for 5 minutes, show them the idea, and then leave students on their own for a week to experiment based on the six notes they’d learned.